Jabs and AIDS
“A plague unleashed”, your article about the possible link between HIV and
mass vaccination campaigns starting in the 1950s in Africa made grim reading
(30 September, p 16).
Surely it would take more than one needle used seven times to
cause the terrible chain of events hypothesised as SIV mutated into HIV? The
process of serial transmission described suggests that the virus would need time
to replicate and mutate in an individual before it was passed on by a(nother)
reused needle, perhaps years later, and that this would have to occur about
seven times before the virus became pathogenic.
The possibilities of such a sequence being broken seems very high in
societies where many vaccination campaigns may have been “one-offs”, access to
modern healthcare for most was limited, and the rate of transmission of the
virus by injection was only about 1 in 300. Perhaps this explains the time lag
up until the 1980s before the virus took hold? Mass immunisation campaigns to
protect children against common childhood diseases would presumably also be
unlikely to contain individuals well advanced on this dreadful transmission
route.
Letter
Preston Marx’s hypothesis that it was the reuse of unsterilised needles that
gave HIV the kick-start necessary to spark Africa’s AIDS epidemic is plausible,
but cannot be proved. It is a viable adjunct to either the natural or iatrogenic
theory of HIV’s origin.
In his article, Michael Day states that “Hooper claims he has spoken to
witnesses who say chimp kidneys were used to grow polio vaccine”. I have never
claimed this. However, I do have video and audio recordings of Africans who
worked at two different chimp-holding centres in Africa (near present-day
Kisangani, Democratic Republic of Congo, and in Bujumbura, Burundi) in the
1950s. They describe the routine extraction of entire organs, including kidneys,
from these animals鈥攁nd, in the second case, their dispatch to a
vaccine-making laboratory in Butare, Rwanda.
Marx concludes that I have bet on “the wrong horse”鈥攚hich is premature.
I shall shortly be publishing evidence that: (a) none of the CHAT polio vaccine
samples that tested negative for the presence of HIV/SIV were from batches
prepared for use in Africa, and (b) most of the claims made by the makers of the
vaccine, Stanley Plotkin and Hilary Koprowski in their addresses to the Royal
Society can be shown to be incorrect. The “horse race” continues.
Folklore
In his article on stereotyping
(30 September, p 38)
Robert Adler casually
refers to old people as “old folks”, thus bracketing them with toddlers the tiny
folk, fairies and other unreal beings (the fair or wee folk) and members of
pre-industrial cultures, with their folk art and folk music. Try referring to a
bunch of science graduates or stockbrokers as “folk”. It sounds silly, doesn’t
it? Perhaps Adler means us to do as he says, not as he does.
Letter
Stereotyping can have some very damaging effects on individuals, but sadly I
don’t share Elizabeth Phelps’s hope that we can be coached out of it. It takes
place during every social encounter and manifests itself in ways far too subtle,
complex and frequent for our limited self-awareness.
The reality is that patterns in personal characteristics do exist, and we
make sense of our society by recognising them. We can help to limit the damage
this can do by questioning assumptions (that is to say, characteristic x often
accompanies characteristic y, but not always) and most importantly, striving to
maintain an accepting and non-judgemental attitude to these characteristics.
Kitty the mimic
Jon Copley reports that dolphins are the only mammals apart from humans known
to be vocal mimics
(2 September, p 6).
I know a domestic cat named Bazil
Cartmell that mimics bird sounds. Bazil sits on a window ledge and imitates the
local Indian mynahs in a friendly fashion, possibly to pretend that he is not a
predator. I have enquired among my friends, and was told of another cat with the
same talent. Cats are well known to communicate with us by voice, using
primitive language.
More euouae
I thought it pertinent to point out how “euouae”
(26 August, p 51)
obtained its meaning. The vowels are taken from the ending of the
Gloria Patri, which monks in days of yore would have sung at the end of
every psalm. In order to avoid having to write out “Et in saecula saeculorum
Amen” time and time again in their manuscripts, they simply resorted to using
this shorthand. It may even have given them time to skip to the front of any
lavatorial queue.
Buzz is back
You published a news piece about a contest to select an astronaut to go to
Mir, and then Chris Elliott wrote to say that this actually happened on a TV
programme in 1991
(19 August, p 5 and
16 September, p 54).
The phenomenon pops
up again in a new novel by Buzz Aldrin, the second person to walk on the Moon,
and his coauthor John Barnes. Their book, The Return: A Novel of the human
adventure, published by Forge in New York, is fun to read and raises a
number of interesting issues about the future of human space exploration. I
won’t give away the plot, but fans of murder mysteries will like it.
Beastly behaviour
The Frankenstein metaphor is used with increasing frequency to describe the
work of scientists that the public find troubling
(“Beastly work”, 30 September, p 48).
This has always surprised me. In the novel, the creature created by Dr
Frankenstein is not in itself the problem. Rather, the disaster that follows is
a consequence of the reaction of ordinary people, including Dr Frankenstein
himself, to that which they do not understand. If anything, the novel is a
metaphor for the damage that can be done by a misguided emotional reaction to a
neutral scientific advance.
This more accurate metaphor certainly has a place in the debate on
genetically modified food and vivisection, among others, but perhaps not in the
way that those opposed to these might hope.
Correction
The labels for Earth and Mars in Figure 4 of Robert Adler’s
Inside Science, Origin of Planetary Systems
(16 September), should be
transposed. And in Box 1, “Celestial sleuthing”, the measure of a light year
should be 9.46 脳 1012 kilometres.
Back to nature
Vivian Moses, writing as chairman of the CropGen Panel
(30 September, p 52),
seems to have misunderstood the result that Andrew Watkinson and his colleagues
at the University of East Anglia derived from their modelling exercise (9
September, p 3) on the decline of the skylark. They showed that the spraying
regime for fields of sugar beet genetically modified to be tolerant to herbicide
was likely (no more than that) to significantly cut weeds used as food by
seed-eating birds. They acknowledged that farmland bird populations had already
fallen, but the model predicted the introduction of these beets could cause a
further decline.
Contrary to Moses’s assertion, farmers do not “fight an unending battle
against scavenging by birds”. They have not done so for decades, because most
birds have been unintentionally eliminated from intensively farmed arable fields
by the use of herbicides and pesticides. The few birds that remain often feed on
weed seeds in autumn beet fields. Skylarks and other small birds feeding in this
way have absolutely no impact on beet production and probably help farmers by
reducing weed seeds in the following crop. As Moses says, farmers still put
scarecrows in fields鈥攏ot to frighten skylarks, but to deter pigeons and
rooks from eating newly sown crops. Most farmers we meet are concerned about the
lack of other farmland birds and want to help to increase their numbers.
It might help CropGen’s case if they followed the excellent coverage of the
university’s paper in New 杏吧原创 by presenting the research in a
more objective way, rather than giving a distorted view of the plight of
farmland birds and the possible role of GM crops. Far from meeting its stated
aim “to bring some sense into a public debate”, Moses’s letter looked to me like
lobbying.
Tiny tumblers
Ian Sample recently reported part of the story on why short gymnasts perform
better than taller ones
(9 September, p 19).
The square-cube law, which explains
many animal characteristics, shows that strength-to-weight ratio varies
inversely with height, assuming that muscle strength in p.s.i. is constant. So
this gives short gymnasts a real advantage in throwing their bodies around.